Warning: Major Spoilers Ahead.
When I first watched Emilia Perez, I was awestruck. I hadn’t seen anything like it. It felt new. This sense of novelty and witnessing the unfamiliar immediately placed this film in the part of my brain that I reserved for those select few movies that made me think when so many made me feel monotonous in their lack of originality. I could overlook criticism of Selena Gomez, whom people love to hate. I could click past the commentary on director Jacques Audiard’s lack of fluent Spanish (and English). When people denounced Audiard’s inability to understand exactly what his cast was saying and what he was directing, I imagined he was drawing the spotlight away from speech and into the emotion of it all; meeting the barrier of language with song and raw feeling, something quite beautiful. And while I still have positive things to say about Emilia Perez — whose rhythm and unique expression of musicality truthfully captivated me the entire two hours and ten minutes— reflecting on the film further has forced me to look at it critically, unveiling a new layer of analysis. Specifically, how this movie at its core is a story of queer identity, and like so many queer stories before, it ends in death.
To preface, I understand why they killed Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), alongside her former wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and Jessi’s paramour (Édgar Ramírez), but that doesn’t make me okay with it. Not because I’m against death as a conclusion — I even consider heartbreak a kind of death, because one mourns the life they could’ve had with another (I’m looking at you, La La Land) — and I actually quite enjoy a sudden, gut-wrenching ending. However, this entire story is based upon this notion of rebirth, and dying defeats the whole point. Audiard frames death as inevitable to complete Emilia’s story, yet it doesn’t have to be that way.
The story follows the cartel kingpin Manitas del Monte, who goes on to transition into the titular Emilia Perez with the assistance of an under-appreciated but brilliant lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña). As a disclaimer, transgender activists had a lot of thoughts on this representation and while I won’t go into this fully, I suggest you read here for further commentary.
Emilia seems to have turned her life around completely, leaving the cartel in the past (which after an entire life dedicated to such practices seems unrealistic). Yet, she cannot ‘let go’ of her former family, leading her to recruit Rita once again to reintroduce her under the pretense of being a long-lost relative. Plot ensues but what matters is this: she could never entirely escape the violence and destruction of her former life, and she dies in much the same way she would’ve had she never started her anti-cartel foundation (La Lucecita), met Rita, or transitioned.
The story positions her transition as this ‘second chance,’ but that’s not how transitions work — if she had felt her womanhood her entire life, as Manitas tells Rita in “El Encuentro,” then the transition surgery would have just affirmed that even more. Yet, Audiard suggests her to be an entirely new person, undermining her transgender identity, and goes on to have her question her decision and code-switch between Manitas and Emilia (shown when she later threatens Jessi). Furthermore, Emilia’s queerness is supposed to be the one thing she’s sure of; she was sure enough to fake her death for it, after all. But, that queerness of realizing who she truly is only ends in disaster and is directly correlated to her suffering and death. And quite frankly, I don’t like this linkage, and I’ll tell you why.
The idea of queer suffering, of queer death, is not a new one. It’s been percolating in mainstream media for decades, for the only representation afforded to LGBTQ+ communities were tragedy or caricatures.
This qualifying principle has roots in public law, with the New York Legislature-enacted Wales Padlock Law of 1927-1967 making it “illegal for theaters to show plays that featured gay and lesbian characters (though some productions managed to get around this restriction)” — with the workarounds being heavily queer-coded characters tragically dying or exercising total villainy over others (NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project). Not only that, but from 1934 to 1969, a set of guidelines for Hollywood films entitled “The Hays Code” was established in which all depictions of homosexuality and “sexual perversions” (Ithaca College) were prohibited, leaving queer characters primed for all sorts of negative stereotyping and again archetyped as the villain.
A modern movie moment that reminds me of this is when Little Women’s Jo March (Saoirse Ronan) is told by an editor that her female main character must be married at the end of her novel — but in this context, the queer characters have to be punished and oftentimes pay tremendously for their ‘perverse’ nature. Whether in the form of Shirley MacLaine committing suicide upon realizing she’s in love with Audrey Hepburn (The Children’s Hour, 1961) or the infamous streetcar in the famously queer-coded A Streetcar Named Desire having its final destination be a cemetery, the imagery of death has not been subtle.
Back to how I started this: I know why she died. The entire movie is about the modern making of a saint, with Perez’s saint-making ‘miracle’ of establishing a new foundation that works against her actions as a cartel kingpin. And as it goes with saints, you can’t be one while alive. The final scene of an Emilia Perez statue being paraded through Mexican streets and honoring her memory wouldn’t hit quite the same if, on another street corner, Perez was still breathing, happy, and eating a sandwich. However, this decision — to kill her — felt wrong. It felt wrong, yet it fits into the archetype of how queer representation has evolved, not only in cinema but in the literature that predated cinema.
She’s the villain before she transitions, and she cannot escape that villainy no matter how hard she tries — the cartel lifestyle refuses to retreat, emphasized in the film’s final scenes. It makes me sad that Emilia could have been a saint without having to die because of a maniacal man, or reveal her identity in a shoot-out to Jessi. And while I stand by my stance that I enjoyed this film, in retrospect, the sense of newness and originality was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The queer suffering present in art didn’t go away in this queer film, but instead took center stage. However, this time, it was wrapped up in a satin bow of a sensationalist musical, of Saldaña’s stunning acting and unique twists — and I’m the first to admit I submitted to the siren call of Audiard. But look a little closer, dig a little deeper, and pull at that satin bow and it reveals an ugly truth: we haven’t left the queer death in the past. It’s still very present, and unless we recognize and actively work against that narrative being hand-woven into our world, then we’ll keep seeing it and it may just become harder and harder to catch, more normalized, and (as many critics have received this film) even celebrated for its ingenuity.
As of January 24th, 2025, Emilia Perez has 81 award wins & 207 nominations.